Re: interactive task starvation

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Willy Tarreau <willy@w.ods.org> wrote:

> Ah no, I never use those montruous environments ! xterm is already 
> heavy. [...]

[ offtopic note: gnome-terminal developers claim some massive speedups
  in Gnome 2.14, and my experiments on Fedora rawhide seem to 
  corraborate that - gnome-term is now faster (for me) than xterm. ]

> [...] don't you remember, we found that doing "ls" in an xterm was 
> waking the xterm process for every single line, which in turn woke the 
> X server for a one-line scroll, while adding the "|cat" acted like a 
> buffer with batched scrolls. Newer xterms have been improved to 
> trigger jump scroll earlier and don't exhibit this behaviour even on 
> non-patched kernels. However, sshd still shows the same problem IMHO.

yeah. The "|cat" changes the workload, which gets rated by the scheduler 
differently. Such artifacts are inevitable once interactivity heuristics 
are strong enough to significantly distort the equal sharing of CPU 
time.

	Ingo